The Banner Is Back — Early last year I spent a couple posts talking about search versus banner advertising and suggested that banner ads were going to come back strong after years of playing second fiddle to search/CPC. That was the thesis behind my badly executed Yahoo (YHOO) trade.

Google Buys an Online Ad Firm for $3.1 Billion — Google agreed to its largest acquisition yesterday, reaching a deal to purchase DoubleClick, the online advertising company, from two private equity firms for $3.1 billion in cash, almost double what it paid for YouTube last year.

Live Internet Video Stream — It's time to start playing with the narcissystem! Last night, as witnessed by dozens of people from 'round the world, I spliced together five separate technologies to create a unified communications experience: — Ustream.tv — freeconferencing.liveoffice.com

Why I'm so excited about Spock — Note: Spock is among the companies launching at the Web 2.0 Expo on Monday. — Michael Arrington wrote the other day about spock, the new people search engine, but I have to say that I don't think he did it justice. Spock is really cool …

Say Good Night, Bandwidth Hog — AN article in PC Magazine last week revealed that customers across the country have received letters from Comcast warning them to limit their bandwidth consumption or face a one-year termination of service. — The company, though, "is refusing to reveal …

Google Acquires Internet (May 2017) — MAY 12, 2017 - BUSINESSWIRE. Mountain View-based search giant Google Inc today announced they've acquired the internet for the astounding sum of $2,455.5 billion in cash. The deal had been rumored in various search blogs since the beginning of the year …

Joost: It's The Metadata, Stupid! — When talking about Joost, people tend to focus on its P2P infrastructure, its media center-like interface and its content deals. Now those are all valid points, but the real key to Joost's success may be something else: A metadata framework that might …

Andrew Keen: The New Naysayers — We have a new champion of the conventional wisdom about social media and the technological elite: Andrew Keen. A self-styled contrarian, his bio at the Britannica Blog reads like a slap in the face: … Keen tries to be an iconoclast …

Fan 4.0 alpha: Anatomy of a kick@$$ Flex app — The application I have been working on for the last month and a half finally hit the Comcast Interactive Media (CIM) Labs page. You can launch the application from here.This should still be considered alpha since this is one state of the completed application.

New Blog At GigaOm, Focusing on Growing A Startup — Found+Read, GigaOm's newest blog, will be a must-subscribe to resource for many web entrepreneurs. It is edited by Carleen Hawn and will have on guest entrepreneurs and other experts come on and share their experiences in building companies.

10 Most Successful Web 2.0 Startups To Date — RSS readers, you can digg the post here. Digg readers, you can subscribe to the RSS feed here. Thanks! — I've had an idea for this kind of a list for months now, but I guess I've been waiting until we have clear, agreed …

How to report paid links — One thing I heard at SES London was that people wanted a way to report paid links specifically. I'd like to get a few paid link reports anyway because I'm excited about trying some ideas here at Google to augment our existing algorithms.

Use ExpoCal to Plan at Expo — There is now a scheduling app for the Web 2.0 Expo. It'll help you keep track of which sessions you want to attend, find out which ones are most popular, and who's going to be where. It can be found at http://cal.web2expo.com.